1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a substrate inspection system, a substrate inspection method, and a substrate inspection apparatus for inspecting substrates in the manufacturing process of semiconductor circuit elements and of liquid crystal display elements, and more particularly, to a substrate inspection system, a substrate inspection method, and a substrate inspection apparatus suitable for the inspection after a lithographic process.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in the manufacturing process of semiconductor circuit elements and liquid crystal display elements, substrates (wafers for IC manufacturing, glass substrates for liquid crystal manufacturing, and so on) are inspected in various ways in order to monitor over-time variations, and to detect reworkable defective products and remove nonreworkable defective products.
The various inspections made in the manufacturing process are mainly classified into a macro inspection and a micro inspection. The macro inspection and micro inspection greatly differ in the area ratio of a region to be inspected in a substrate and the entire substrate (an inspection area ratio), and also in the size of an object to be inspected and in required inspection accuracy.
The inspection area ratio in the macro inspection is 4% to 100%, and the size of an object to be inspected is several 100 μm or larger. That is, the macro inspection is for inspecting a large region for macroscopic defects visible to the human eye (for example, a foreign particle, a scratch on a resist pattern, and so on). On the other hand, in the micro inspection the inspection area ratio is about 10−8%, and inspection accuracy is 100 nm to 10 nm or less. In other words, the micro inspection is for inspecting an ultrasmall region for microscopic defects invisible to the human eye (for example, anomalies in line width of a resist pattern and so on).
Therefore, the macro inspection has been executed for large-range inspection on a substrate and the micro inspection has been executed for detailed inspection of a substrate, taking advantage of their merits. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-76077 discloses apparatus for executing macro inspection and micro inspection separately.
In view of realizing a single substrate inspection system to combine separate inspections of both of the regions, separately inspecting large and small regions of a substrate in the prior art described above, however, is not always an efficient way to operate the system.